Putting a Face to Europe in North Africa: Why the EU needs a Special Representative to respond to the Arab Spring

The European Union and its member states continue to struggle to find a response to the Arab Spring. Past policy approaches had little impact on the area’s regimes, if anything doing more to support them than reform them. So it makes sense that the EU is now looking to counter its lack of credibility with the new movements and powers of reform in the southern Mediterranean area by strongly reorienting its policies. Doubts are beginning to mount that the emerging European External Action Service (EEAS) has the capacity to support immediate and lasting developments toward democracy and economic and social stabilization when it is still tasked with building up its presence in the region. That’s why the EU should utilize one of its established and successful foreign policy instruments and name an EU Special Representative (EUSR) for North Africa.

As a response to the dramatic upheavals in the Southern Mediterranean, the European Commission has developed some initial proposals for the realignment of the EU’s North Africa policy. But this broad transformation approach hardly offers anything new. Moreover, the problem until now has not been intention, but implementation. Conditionality -- changed to “mutual accountability” in the latest report from May 2011 -- not been called for consistently in the past. An EUSR with a strong presence in the region could be instrumental in turning this principle into practice.

In order to accompany the protracted transformation processes and to influence them positively, a continuous presence on the ground -- or at the very least intense travelling -- are essential, as is a convincing policy approach. This is especially true in a region where personal interaction plays such a decisive role. An EUSR who commutes between North African countries and European capitals would offer a face for the future southern neighborhood policy both on location as well as within the EU. This continual presence would serve to build confidence between the EU and its (new) partners in North Africa -- a quintessential buttress for a qualitatively new neighborhood policy. For it is with confidence that the feeling of “mutual accountability” called for by the EU can begin to arise.

A further area where an EUSR could bring value is in the multilateral aspects of the neighborhood policy. There are a multitude of regional problems that have to be dealt with under a common framework (such as regional security questions, energy, and the protection of the environment). Providing a link between bilateral cooperation and the existing forums for multilateral cooperation, the EUSR could inter alia maintain regular contact with the Arab League and the GCC.

Past experiences by the EUSR have shown that a tailor-made mandate is essential if they are to work effectively. While the EUSR for North Africa would be affiliated with the EEAS and would have to chair the new Task Force for the Southern Mediterranean, the High Representative should also ensure a sensible integration of the EUSR in the Union for the Mediterranean, in which the EEAS will play a larger role in the future.

The appointment of a Special Representative for the region would allow the EU to back up its proclamations of a realignment of its Mediterranean policies both personally and politically and allow it to credibly develop its intentions through a corresponding person. A Special Representative for North Africa would have to not only have experience in the region, but should frankly be an ex-politician who could interact with partners in the region at eye level. Ideally he or she would have credibility in the areas of transformation, democracy, and human rights (it would be conceivable to have a former head of state or minister from Central or Eastern Europe). And their nationality would play a decisive role -- why not send a representative from Sweden, Finland, or Poland who would be uncontaminated by old ties? The southern EU states are already well represented in the secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean. And the last few months have shown that North Africa can no longer be the pet project of the EU’s Mediterranean states but requires answers from the whole of Europe.